SimCity 5 Here I Come!

Not too shabby for a new Mayor

Launch nonsense aside, I’ve decided to join the masses playing SimCity 5. I’ve never played SimCity of any kind. For several years, I was a huge The Sims fan. I’ve played and owned every version and the accompanying expansions through The Sims 3 Apartment Life. I even played The Sims Online and was in the beta no less. Oh how the fall of that game broke my heart. It was like the designers had never played The Sims. *Cries big splashy tears*

A couple of years into playing MMOs, my love of The Sims slowly waned. The attraction of micromanaging a bunch of Sims in a solo play environment was less than appealing, with each new MMO adventure. Gradually, no one in our household or any of our immediate friends played The Sims anymore, having opted for massive online experiences instead. Most of my gal pals ended up in Second Life - *hurl*. While my immediate and extended family fell head over heels for fantasy MMOs and co-op console titles.

On a break from Guild Wars 2 and not wanting to burn out on Tera Online, I was in the market for a casual friendly game when I saw Gary Gannon’s play through of SimCity 5 on GBTV. I just noticed a second play through that I'll watch tonight.  

SimCity 5 appeared to have many of the visual aspects and high level behaviors from The Sims 3 but on a grander management scale. In The Sims, I would sometimes use hack programs to create large homes like compounds, and let the inhabitants act out using “free will” to see what would happen. So the idea of managing things at a city level and letting the system randomly generate populace behavior and events was very intriguing.

How to prevent trailer park homes next to middle income houses??

The first evening I played, I wanted to test the waters and learn the basics. Things were going well until the server hiccupped, doing a rollback twice. Both times I lost significant progress. Losing the progress wasn’t as bad as the horrible luck of fires breaking out in several areas the second time before I replaced the services and money I’d lost. I was only slightly miffed at having lost a couple of hours of effort.

Once I branched out into creating a more elaborate I started taking breaks after important milestones. I exit out of the city to the main menu in hopes of allowing enough time for the city to get properly synchronized to the server before continuing on. I’m not buying the need for the game to be 100% online without any way for the user to force a local save. Such a poor decision, leaving EA/Maxis open to poor customer satisfaction due to lost progress in a game that is 100% about MANAGING PROGRESS. Like DUH!!

Using my “go do something else for a while and hope the damn thing saves” approach I haven’t lost any more progress. The game is quite addictive. I’m now playing what I consider my alpha city, learning more advanced features and having a good time. I’m less concerned about designing a perfect city grid, visually attractive layouts or the constant protesters outside Town Hall that I’d like to kick in the teeth, as I am understanding logical growth planning. So far so good, SimCity 5 is proving to be a fun diversion and break from Tera Online. 

 

I'd really like to kick these folks in the teeth!

 

Related articles

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Comments

[Sarzan]

Diversion from Tera? We haven't played in weeks! Cheating on me with another game on static night... Tisk! Tisk!

[Alysianah aka Saylah]

LOL. Might be time to pick a new game. Chain of events, mostly on my end, has our progress out of sync. :-)

[Capn John]

My vote is for Wizard 101 ;)

[Alysianah aka Saylah]

I keep hoping they come out with a card game version of W101 for the ipad. I'd be all over it. I didn't enjoy the expansion zones nearly as much as I did the originals one.